Murder At Slippery Slope Youth Camp, Page 2

  I hate to be a prude but neither of them songs sound like something kids in a church bus oughta be singing. I kept expecting the boy’s fathers to do something about it but, like some of the boys, most of them were wearing earphones and playing with little electronic gizmos. After about three-hundred miles into the trip, I started wishing I had me a little electronic gizmo to stick in my ears, too!

  I was very nervous about going over the border. There’s just something about being questioned by officials that makes a body feel guilty even if you’re not. I think the fact that all of us were riding in a bus with the words Little Faith Community Church written on it helped. Either that or the border patrol weren’t looking forward to climbing onto a bus where a bunch of teenage boys had been stewing in their own sweat for eight hours, not to mention the fact that we had eaten at Taco Bell a few hours earlier.

  Teenage boys ain’t real polite when it comes to digestive problems I discovered. In fact, most of them find the art of passing gas real hilarious. Some of them had taken off their big ole tennis shoes too, which was a mistake when it came to adding to the aroma of the bus.

  Ella, who is sensitive to smells, just kept looking sicker and sicker and shooting me angry glances like it was all my fault she was involved in this mess. I was in the process of thinking teaching VBS and passing out gospel tracts weren’t nothing compared to having to live through this trip….just about the time we pulled into the Chi-chi-maun ferry boat at the tip end of the Tobermory peninsula and me and Ella got to leave the bus and go sit in the fresh air for a couple hours.

  All good things come to an end eventually and it weren’t long before we had to climb back onto that bus again. Then another hour to get to the camp. All in all, it took us a full eighteen hours of bus-riding before we were looking at the dock where a boat would take us to the camp.

  By the time I got down out of that church bus I was sore as a boil. Could hardly get these old legs to work. Would have been tempted to turn around and go back home except I couldn’t of faced making the drive. People who travel a lot just mystify me. Give me a house with a porch any day of the week. I can see enough of life walking and driving past my little home in South Shore to satisfy me good enough.

  I was proud of myself for one thing, though. I managed to get through the whole ordeal without thumping that Peterson boy on the head. He’s just like his granddaddy. I used to want to thump him on the head, too, back when we were in school together.

  We were met at a little dock by a man named Denny who was dad to some kids who went to that camp each summer. He had a cottage on the lake, and he said he was the volunteer bookkeeper and grounds keeper and camp manager since he lived so close. He was the kind of man who could have used a little more hair on top of his head. Especially with as cold as Canada is supposed to get in the winter time. I ain’t fond of the fashion some men have of shaving their head when they think they’re starting to go a little bald. Hang onto what you got as long as you can is my theory, but I suppose shaving their head cuts down on the cost of haircuts.

  He looked to me like he was maybe in his late thirties, but he was wearing them low-hanging britches some young men think they got to wear to be in fashion. He weren’t wearing his pants as low as I’ve seen some trying to do, but it was annoying enough. I don’t know if the man didn’t own a decent belt, or if he thought it would help him fit in with the kids who’d be coming to camp pretty soon, but it was all I could do to not tell him to act like he had good sense and pull his britches up! I was so tired and out of sorts by this time that it’s a wonder I didn’t say something to hurt his feelings—but Ella knows me real well, and when I drew a breath and opened my mouth, she stuck her hand over it, shook her head, and I shut up. I’ll admit it. Ella’s a better person than me. Has been since we was in first grade together.

  So—we got into a couple little motor boats and went skimming off across the lake to the tip of this little peninsula called Slippery Slope with poor Ella hanging on for dear life.

  Some people think the camp got that name because of some immoral things going on there, but Denny told us on the way over in the boat that it was named after a deep spring way back in the woods where the bank was steep and the moss around the spring was always slick with water and animals would sometimes accidentally slide down the mossy slope trying to get a drink.

  Of course, after everything that happened at that camp while me and Ella were cooking there, I think maybe the name fits for things other than a spring in the woods!

  Now, getting into the boat from the dock was a bit of a trick for me and Ella, but I have to admit, them boys were real chivalrous and helped us step into and out of them two little boats like we was their own grandma’s. I guess it was finally dawning on them now that they’d seen the place and how far off the beaten track it was and that me and Ella were the only things between them and a week of hunger. It ain’t like there’s a McDonald’s handy!

  Another boat took the food supplies Ella and me had bought along. They had a cookhouse that weren’t too bad except for the mice who’d been living there all winter long and weren’t anxious to give it up. Me and Ella did battle with mice and dirt, the boys and their daddies ate peanut-butter sandwiches we let them fix their selves, and then they got started on tearing down an old bunkhouse while Mr. Droopy Drawers got the old generator started that would bring water up from the lake.

  Well, we finally got ourselves sorted out. Me and Ella got us a pot of stew simmering, then we went and got all the dead spiders and flies swept out of the old cabin we’d be sleeping in. The Peterson boy brought us a bouquet of wildflowers for our room from the baseball field they were mowing, and that was so sweet of him that I decided he was a pretty good kid after all as long as he weren’t singing about bottles of beer on the wall. He can’t help it if he took after his grandpa. Poor thing.

  We caught us four mice that first night. Ella was real proud of that. Of course, we only had four mousetraps at the camp or there would probably have been more.

  Denny brought some building supplies over and everyone figured out what they were supposed to be doing and life got into a routine. I’m not usually all that excited about cooking, but them boys and their daddys was o hungry when they came in for meals that all we heard were praise and compliments. I started looking forward to setting the food out and watching them gobble it up. I even got a few hugs for doing such a good job. Of course, Ella knows her way around a three-pound slab of hamburger better than most so she’s the one that needs the credit.

  Denny didn’t come by all that much, which was understandable since he had kids and a pregnant wife back home. After all, he was just a volunteer. Nobody could expect him to be there all the time. Besides, he owned a lumber mill somewhere on the island that he ran the rest of the time.

  At least he didn’t come by much until a woman showed up who introduced herself as the camp nurse. She’d come out early she said, because we were there and one of the boys might get hurt. She was a pretty thing who liked wearing short shorts. Of course the sight of them bare legs was a bit distracting to our teenage boys. I saw the Peterson boy run smack into a tree once when she was walking past.

  The thing that caught me and Ella’s interest, though, was how Denny started coming around a whole lot more after that pretty little nurse showed up. Turns out they’d known each other in high school and they had all kinds of things to catch up on. They sat out on the porch a’laughin’ and talkin’ for hours.

  I suppose it was all innocent enough. They didn’t go off alone or anything. It stood to reason that they’d have things to talk about. Besides, we were just two old women and it weren’t none of our business anyway what they did, but I did start feeling real sorry for that pregnant wife of his. Them short shorts worried me some, too. No good thing comes out of women a’showin’ themselves off like that. Especially the ones who look good while they’re a’doing it. The rest of us it don’t particularly matter, I suppose.

  Of course
me and Ella had plenty to do to keep us busy. Especially after Denny told us that one of the board members was coming for a visit. He said this was a board member who actually had some money and could help the camp if he was so minded. He asked us to make sure the kitchen was clean and a nice meal fixed. Getting company like that made me and Ella a little nervous. We started scrubbing that old kitchen like it was actually possible to get raw wood and stoves clean that had fifty years of grease baked on everything. We caught us seven more mice all told. It’s hard to ever feel like a kitchen is truly clean when you got mice scurrying around.

  Anyway, it turned out that the board member weren’t there for a meal after all—even though Ella had outdone herself. Mr. Haney asked Denny to unlock the camp office. I saw him in there turning pages on some ledgers and not looking very happy about what he was seeing. The nurse tried to be friendly, but Mr. Haney only seemed to have eyes for the camp financial figures. She told Ella she was going back home to Toronto for a while.

  While the board member was there, Denny got real motivated and started helping our guys out. We discovered that he was pretty good with a chainsaw, hammer, and weed eater. Then at one point, we saw Mr. Haney wagging his finger under Denny’s nose. We couldn’t hear what he was saying but one of them ledger books was under his arm, and he opened it up and started pointing things out to Denny that Denny didn’t seem none too happy to see. I figure maybe Mr. Droopy Drawers had been putting a little money in his own pocket he was not supposed to—I mean, he had all them children and he didn’t seem to be spending too much time at his lumber mill or was even all that work brickle. Ella and me talked it over, and she said she thought if there was any problems with the book keeping, though, it was probably just poor math skills on someone’s part. She didn’t think anyone who was a Christian would take money from a church camp. She tends to cut people a little more slack than me. Maybe it’s just because she’s nicer. I figure people can surprise you. Sometimes it’s a good surprise. Sometimes there’s a lot more bad surprises inside of them than you’d ever think.

  Anyways, me and Ella were watching everything out the window while we were fixing food. It was as good as watching a picture show. One thing that had worried me about coming up here was knowing I wouldn’t get to watch my soap operas for a week, but now I started feeling like maybe I wasn’t missing a thing. We had our own soap opera going on right under our noses. The only thing I wished was that somebody would turn up the volume!

  Well, Mr. Haney took off in a motor boat and Denny slowed way down on his working around the camp until it fizzled out completely. Then he just sat there on the porch looking all sad and pouty-faced. Ella, bless her heart, wanted to cheer him up, so she decided to show off a little bit and concoct a special eight-layer cake with homemade icing and some wild strawberries on top that the boys found in the overgrown baseball field. We got so caught up in that project we lost track of Denny. The boys were happy with the eight-layer cake, though. There weren’t a crumb left. We ended up not seeing Denny again for the next couple of days.

  It ain’t all that hot in June in Canada, but a body still works up a sweat when you’re working in a kitchen over a cook stove. Me and Ella heated up a little kettle of water every morning and took a quick sponge bath before heading into the kitchen, but after a few days of that, my body started craving a good soak.

  Every afternoon, Reverend Jimmy Bell and all the other fellows jumped in that lake and gave their selves a good washing before coming to the cookhouse. They always looked so refreshed after their late afternoon plunge into the lake that I started thinking it might be a good idea for me and Ella to go jump in, too. When the boys weren’t around, of course. I didn’t want to scare them to death with the sight of me in a bathing suit. The Peterson boy wouldn’t run into a tree if he saw me walking past in my old bathing suit—he’d probably shoot himself!

  The nice thing about that swimming place was that it was far, far down a path and just as private as it could be. No one but God, Himself, to watch us—and I figured that if He made us, he weren’t going to be too shocked at the sight of a couple of old ladies whose bodies had seen better days.

  Ella weren’t too keen on the idea. She said for me to go ahead without her. I’d forgotten about Ella’s fear of the water. She was okay on a boat with a life jacket on, but she said that actually getting in and swimming would scare the daylights out of her. She said she was going to stay in her cabin and put her feet up and get some shut-eye before starting supper.

  So, on Thursday about noon, I got into my old polka-dot one piece, grabbed a dry towel and some shampoo and headed through the woods to where I had heard the men and boys whooping and hollering and having fun each day.

  It was a long hike back through the woods and I was keeping my eye out for any snakes on the path, but I was also appreciating all the beauty around me. Them white birch trees and ferns were something special. I did think I seen a snake for a second, but it only turned out to be one of the nurse’s green flip-flops I’d seen her wearing. The toe thing was made out of plastic that looked like snake skin. I remembered seeing it on her feet because I thought it was something you’d never catch me buying. I picked it up, planning to give it back to her next time she came around.

  To my surprise, there was a nice floating deck to walk out on and a ladder to climb down into the water from. I laid my shampoo and soap and towel on the deck and lowered myself into that water. It was so cold it took my breath away and made me wonder if I’d gone and lost my mind.

  However, I do have a stubborn streak in me, and I figured if the men and boys could take baths in this water, old Doreen could stand it, too. I’ve never been sure what’s best when it comes to swimming in cold water—to inch into it, teeth chattering all the way, or just take the plunge and let the body get over the shock as quick as possible. I tend to lean toward the take-the-plunge philosophy. So I held my nose and threw myself off the deck frontward, swallowing up the shock of the chill of the lake, and I held my breath while my body adjusted.

  My jumping-in method worked fine. In a few seconds, the water started feeling pleasant and I was able to look around and start enjoying myself. Reverend Jimmy Bell weren’t kidding when he called this a wilderness camp. Here I was in this big lake ringed with nothing but trees. Everywhere I looked there was no people. Just beautiful old trees, blue sky, and blue water. I heard a loon calling in the distance and I thought, “Doreen, you’re as close to paradise right now as you’re ever going to get this side of heaven.”

  I don’t care what age you are, when you get in neck-deep water, you start feeling like a kid again. I had been a strong swimmer in my youth and it all came back to me as I cavorted in that lake. Yeah, I said, cavorted. It would have looked ridiculous to anyone if they’d been looking on. I floated on my back for a while and paddled myself around with my feet, and then I did some underwater summersaults, and this old lady had about as much fun as a person can have when they’re on the other side of seventy. I shampooed my hair, rinsed it out by floating on my back, and talked to a little-bitty lizard who was sunning itself and looking at me like I was the most peculiar thing it had even seen in its short life.

  Since there was no one around to think I’d completely lost my mind, except the lizard and a bird or two, I even had an out-loud talk with God. I complimented him on his good work a’making this pretty lake and thanked him for shoving me out of my rut, and I even thanked him for us having the good luck to have a preacher who knew which end of a hammer to use. I’ve noticed that preachers who know how to work with their hands just naturally have a better attitude in general than the ones who think they gotta call a deacon to change a light bulb in their house.

  Don’t laugh. It’s happened. I know because my daddy was the deacon that one preacher called for that very thing. Daddy told Mama that particular day that it might be a good idea for Asbury Theological Seminary down near Lexington, Kentucky to add a basic home-maintenance course to their classes.

&
nbsp; Anyway, the lake was calm, the loons were calling to each other, and I was just floating on my back in the water with my eyes closed, feeling real good about myself, when I bumped into something. I thought it was a log, but it weren’t no log. It was some man, lying face down in the water, deader than a door nail.

  There are times when you discover that you are capable of a whole lot more than you ever thought. That was me at that instant. I didn’t quite walk on water but I came close a’trying to get out of there! Once I hit land, I found out that I can still run pretty good, too! Hadn’t run for years, but there I was high-stepping it through the ferns at triple-time getting back to camp. I didn’t even take the time to watch out for snakes because I decided the snakes could watch out for their own selves. Thank goodness I’d kept my old canvas tennis shoes on in the water, or my feet would have been in bad shape the next day.

  So here I come, streaking into camp, my gray wet hair flying, wearing nothing but my faded out blue polka-dot bathing suit and a pair of worn-out Keds, screeching fit to beat the band.

  Charlie, the Peterson’s boy’s father, finally got hold of me and give me a shake. “Doreen,” he said. “What on earth are you yowling about? Get your breath and tell us. Was it a snake?”

  “Ain’t.” I bent over, put my hands on my knees, and started sucking in air trying to catch my breath. “No. Snake. Dead. Body.” I pointed at the lake.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” he said, astonished. “Another dead body?”

  I nodded and caught a couple other quick gasps.

  “It just don’t pay to travel, Charlie,” I said. “It don’t pay at all! I never once found a dead body until I left South Shore.”